Probably no record distills the video-game quality of so much contemporary pop more succinctly than M. C. Hammer's hit ''U Can't Touch This.'' Over a funk riff appropriated from Rick James's 1981 ''Super Freak,'' the 27-year-old rap star from Oakland, Calif., proclaims his pop triumph in doggerel that says, in effect, It's great to be top dog in this Darwinian jungle!

''U Can't Touch This'' is less a song than a noisy sonic toy whose music is only marginally more sophisticated than the sound effects of Nintendo. But this hit and its cartoonish video have helped make Mr. Hammer's second album, ''Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em,'' the best-selling pop album of 1990 as well as the best-selling rap album to date. Sales have surpassed four million copies.

Madonna's ''Vogue,'' the year's best-selling single, with sales of more than two million, elaborates on the same survival-of-the-fittest ethic. A dance-floor training manual on looking good, it intersperses the names of celebrities who have earned the star's respect with instructions to ''strike the pose.'' In the song's video, the star and several dancers suck in their cheeks and adopt the self-enraptured pouts of erotic deities flaunting their inaccessibility.

That these songs and performers should triumph in the age of the music video makes perfect sense. Although image-making has always had its role in the development of pop stars' careers, the wedding of pop music and video has shifted the balance of power between a song and the image of its performer. Where once that image augmented the music, nowadays the music serves the image, which in turn often serves a fast-food or cola advertising campaign and ultimately a whole line of merchandising. Pop stars have always endorsed products, but it has only been in the age of the music video that the star image and the product have become indissoluble.

Pop's icy star images, mechanized clatter and graffitilike songs all reflect a romance with technology that is turning modern living rooms into video-dominated, computer-driven entertainment centers wired for high-fidelity. In this environment, pop music is no longer a world unto itself but an adjunct of television, whose stream of commercial images projects a culture in which everything is for sale and the only things that count are fame, power and the body beautiful.

As the image has taken precedence over the song, the essence of pop has begun to change. Songs have become so fragmentary and charged with electronic beats that the main subject of popular music is becoming technology itself.

A new pantheon of pop stars has ascended in this brave new world, spawned by video and prancing to digitally enhanced rhythms. Seven of the top-selling acts in the last two years - New Kids on the Block, Bobby Brown, Paula Abdul, Mr. Hammer, Milli Vanilli, Madonna and Janet Jackson - became stars largely by virtue of their cute and catchy music videos.

Today, a top-selling performer, especially one under 30, doesn't have to have much musical talent to be a pop icon. Machines now do much of the work live musicians used to do, both in the recording studio and onstage.

Good looks, which have always been an asset to a performing career, are more crucial than ever; failing beauty, a calculatedly kooky or provocative look suffices. An appealing telegenic image is now so important that looks can even substitute for talent: the male duo Milli Vanilli, whose debut album sold more than six million copies, sports an exotically sexy look but in concert lip-syncs its hits for lack of musical ability.

More and more songs are taking as their subject the video image of the star performing them. ''U Can't Touch This'' is the strutting victory dance of someone who ascended from the streets to win the commercial sweepstakes of rap. ''Vogue'' parodies Madonna's own rise from an exhibitionist club performer to an international pop star whose abilities as a singer and songwriter were developed only after she became famous.

Both ''Vogue'' and its music video raise narcissism to a new high in pop music by presenting glamorous posing as synonymous with self-realization. The lyric updates the pop-song notion advanced 20 years ago by John Lennon and Sly Stone that everybody is a star. But two decades ago that sentiment expressed a democratic philosophy that each individual has special qualities regardless of race and background. In the world of ''Vogue,'' those qualities have been reduced to beauty, glamour and fantasies of Hollywood conquest.

Androgyny and Aerobics:

Where Are the Romantics?

The mechanized, electronic beats that drive contemporary pop, together with music videos, have sparked a resurgence in choreography. But instead of being derived from ballet and modern dance, the vocabulary reflects the martial arts and aerobics. It exalts physical power, stamina and discipline over grace, tenderness and emotional expression.

This choreographed language of self-defense extends to the images and the vocal styles of the performers themselves. Today's two leading young singer-songwriters, Sinead O'Connor and Tracy Chapman, flaunt a forbidding androgyny that contrasts sharply with the warmer earth-mother and folk-madonna images of women pop stars of the 70's like Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon.

Miss O'Connor, whose second album, ''I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got,'' has sold three million copies and made her the first major new woman pop star of the 90's, reached No. 1 earlier this year singing Prince's sad-hearted ballad ''Nothing Compares 2 U.'' In addition to projecting vulnerability into the song, the 23-year-old Irish singer expresses resentment and hostility over her plight. In its video, she is pictured as a glowering talking head with close-cropped hair, a defiant prisoner of war in a battle of the sexes.

These women are a lonely and embattled lot compared to their 70's forerunners, because they have no male counterparts. The most remarkable aspect of today's resurgence of the singer-songwriter tradition is that it is sexually one-sided: there are no heirs to the sensitive romantic spirit of James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkel or John Denver. No wonder women singers seem so dour.

Those women pop stars who don't exhibit an icy androgyny tend to flaunt a tough hyper-sexy bravado. Madonna, Ms. Abdul and Ms. Jackson wear their makeup like war paint. The image of the ''Material Girl'' that Madonna projected into pop culture in the mid-80's has become an entrenched pop fashion style.

Technology Takeover:

Is Engineering Everything?

The one single force that has helped change the mood of pop music from warm to cold, from human to mechnical, from song-oriented to image-oriented has been the technological revolution of the last half century that brought high fidelity and television to the masses.

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That revolution went on to spawn long-playing records, tape, stereophonic sound, cassettes and compact disks. The development of high fidelity also spawned a staggering array of electric instruments, amplification systems and a computer technology that has enabled new sounds to be invented and existing ones to be torn down, rebuilt, stored and cranked up to previously unimaginable volumes.

Heavy metal, hard funk and rap - the most important commercial genres that have risen in the wake of the 60's rock revolution - depend on technologies that have turned a large segment of commercial pop into a sonic spectator sport. In the age of the singing, dancing, aerobicized music-video icon, the lines between pop stardom and athletic celebrity have begun to blur. Rap performers have led the way in breaking down the lines between pop, sports and stand-up comedy.

The bigger-is-better mystique of technology has coincided with and fostered the macho ethic that has increasingly taken over pop since World War II and made ''beautiful'' a negative adjective reserved for ultraconservative music radio.

As the volume of pop has increased, hard rhythm has chopped up the traditional narrative song and turned it into a tribal shout. Rap, which dispenses with melody altogether, is the latest manifestation of the trend. Given the intensity of pop beats, the only way that storytelling could be perpetuated in pop without sacrificing those crucial beats was by giving up melody. Many see that sacrifice as an abandonment of meaningful musical content.

Rap is only one indication of the way in which the extramusical dimensions of pop have pushed musical values to the sidelines. The very process of creating songs and records has turned composition into engineering. During the last decade, the home studio, with its computer-generated arsenal of sequencers, synthesizers and sound effects, has largely replaced the piano and guitar as a creative tool and made songwriting and sound engineering nearly synonymous.

That technology has unleashed a flood of hard-edged pop records like Bell Biv Devoe's ''Poison,'' whose textures often have little connection to acoustic instruments and whose electronic beats echo the discharge of automatic weapons. It has changed the process of music-making from a communal enterprise to an increasingly solitary one. Even those pop records that still feature a musical ensemble are usually compiled instrument by instrument, track by track, in separate recording sessions.

The mechanization of pop sound, though presaged in the 1950's by rock-and-roll's accentuated beat, didn't reach full swing until the mid-1960's when more sophisticated technology enabled producers and engineers to begin storing, editing and recombining the components of a record. A new tradition of mechanized sound no longer based on the values of live musical performance was born.

As pop records expanded into a multibillion-dollar industry, live performances tended to emulate the mechanized sonic perfection of records. And in the half decade since videos have become a fixture, pop concerts have begun to reproduce the look and style of videoclips, right down to performer's lip-synching to music that is, increasingly, canned.

It's becoming more obvious that the wonderful technology that was developed to make pop music easier to record and clearer to the ears has tricked us. Instead of enriching our collective musical palette, it is controlling that palette. Who could deny that the synthetic sound of the latest studio instrumentation - at least the way it is used in the bulk of commercial pop - is not as human as the sound of an acoustic orchestra or ensemble? Who could deny that oppressively ear-shattering music has spread, from rock concerts to clubs, movie theaters and even to Broadway?

The toy sound of so much of today's pop instrumentation goes hand in hand with shrill, immature voices. From Michael Jackson to Madonna to Ms. Abdul, Mr. Brown, Milli Vanilli and the New Kids on the Block, the typical pop singing voice nowadays has a synthesized nasal timbre. Even on records by the most gifted young pop voices - Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey - the technology imbues the voices with a crust of frost.

Pop as Enterprise:

Today's Ideology

The new generation of pop star is the first to come of age after much of the current technology was in place. That may be why so many young performers don't show the reverence for older musical traditions that their forerunners did. Many leading rock stars of the 60's and 70's, who grew up when the long-playing record was young and the tape recorder a novelty, were drawn by blues, folk and country performers whose music was predominantly acoustic. For that generation - rockers who are 35 to 50 - pop was something of a spiritual calling. For many, the discovery and integration of American roots music into the popular mainstream partook of the same utopian spirit that spurred the civil rights and antiwar movements and sexual revolution.

For the younger generation of stars, pop is more of a material enterprise. Instead of roots music, its traditions are disco and new wave, commercial genres forged in the late 70's. Disco unhitched pop from its longstanding commitment to roots sources to explore technologically ''improved'' rhythms and sound effects, along with space-age fantasies of people as sex and exercise machines. New wave, which was an outgrowth of the punk-rock movement, reasserted the generational rebellion that had fueled the original rock-and-roll rebels 20 years earlier, but added to it a flavor of nihilism along with a media-wise self-consciousness.

Together, disco and new wave defined the values of today's pop mainstream. Almost all the beats and synthesized textures of contemporary pop are refinements of disco's body-music ethos and its technological ideals. Much of rap is really punk propelled by hard-funk rhythms and charged with anger over urban blight and social inequity. In laying out the brutal facts, it pulls away the protective masks of melody and a pretty voice the better to assert itself, and uses music as a tool of social assault.

Although the temptation is to blame outside forces for the deteriorating condition of pop, today's sound - like other major modern inventions, from the automobile to nuclear power - is something we created for ourselves. And like other technological innovations, it has its hazards. Deafening electronic feedback, for instance, is a kind of esthetic toxic waste, since it can literally destroy hearing. And even though the shriek and clatter of pop records can be stimulating, it is also the musical corollary to junk food.

Certainly the music in the air has always contained a large helping of disposable sounds. But amid the detritus there have always been plenty of pop nuggets whose appeal bridged generations and created an uplifting sense of a shared common experience. Today's metallic squawk threatens to destroy that communal warmth.

Saddest of all is the fact that this music is inescapably an aural reflection of the material and spiritual world we inhabit. It is our collective chatter and romance of youth. And it has never sounded meaner, more aggressive, more denying of beauty, and more devoid of sensitivity, thought and feeling than it does today.

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A version of this article appears in print on August 5, 1990, on Page 2002001 of the National edition with the headline: Strike the Pose: When Music Is Skin Deep POP VIEW; Video Age Music: Stark Images, Shrill Voices, Skin Deep. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe